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that—our Janet, a little girl! She and I had a bungalow to ourselves and positively legions of people to wait on us. I think Janet had a manicurist for every nail.
    “And they did a thing with mud and hot stones—I swear to you there was magic in it. Nothing feels that good without magic.
    “Of course, the terrible secret of places like that is that they’re horrifically boring. You have no idea the extremes we were driven to. I played tennis. Me! They got very scoldy when it came to drinking on the court, I can tell you. I told them it’s just part of my form. You can’t relearn technique, not at my age.
    “Well, by the third day Janet and I were considering having sex with each other just to relieve the tedium. And then, like a dark angel of mercy come to safeguard my virtue, Julia appeared.
    “It was like one of those Poirot mysteries set at a posh country seat. There was some accident down by the pool—I was never clear on the details, but an enormous fuss was made. I suppose that’s one of the things you pay for: first-class fuss. At any rate the first time I laid eyes on our Julia she was being carried through the lobby strapped to a backboard, soaking wet and cursing a blue streak and insisting that she was fine, absolutely fine. Take your paws off me, you damned dirty apes.
    “The next day I came down to the bar around three or four in the afternoon and there she was again, drinking alone, all in black. Vodka gimlets I believe. The mysterious lady. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t belong at the spa. Her hair was a rat’s nest, you literally can’t imagine. Worse than now even. Her cuticles were bitten down to the quick. Shoulders hunched. Nervous stutter. And then she had no grasp of how things worked. She tried to tip the staff. She pronounced the names of French wines with an actual French accent.
    “Of course I was drawn to her at once. I figured she must be Russian. Daughter of a jailed oligarch, that sort of thing. No one but a Russian could afford to stay there and still have hair that bad. Janet thought she was just out of rehab and from the looks of it headed right back in. Either way we fell upon her like starving people.
    “The approach was subtle. The trick was not setting off her alarms, which were all obviously set to a hair trigger. It was Janet, that mistress of seduction, who cracked her in the end—she planted herself in a public lounge and complained loudly about a rather involved computer issue. You could watch our Julia wrestle with herself, but it was a fait accompli.
    “After that—well, you know how it is on those vacations. As soon as you learn another person’s name they become inescapable. We ran into each other everywhere. You wouldn’t think a place like that was her style, would you? But there she was, up to her neck in mud, with cucumber slices over her eyes. She was constantly plunging in and out of baths and things. Once Janet tried to go in a steam bath with her, but she’d turned it up so high everybody else had to flee. Probably she had them thrash her with birch twigs. It was like she was trying to rid herself of some stubborn taint.
    “It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge. Not talking. We didn’t know she was a magician, of course. How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.
    “Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy? It was exactly like that, except that we were fleeing magic. One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten